Hall of fame post here by V.oat user parrygrin, gents:

I mean...what do we mean by "better"?

For that matter, what do we mean by "men" and "women"?

If by "better" we mean more money and social status, and by "men" we mean "a few men who conform to or exceed societal notions of what a 'Real Man' is", then sure, "men" have it better, and always will. In every society across times and across cultures, men are incentivized by greater rewards to undertake greater risks, because there will always be societal value somebody undertaking risks--especially if they can do so without also risking a perfectly good uterus. To be clear, though, we're talking about federal politicians (and probably not even the House of Representatives) and the C-suites of the largest corporations. In other words, the .1% and higher, not the 1%. We're also not talking about physical or mental health. All that said, yeah, sure, it's probably better to be Donald Trump or Jamie Dimon than it is to be Carly Fiorina or Marissa Meyer. You make more money, people respect you more, your spouses and extra-marital affairs are hotter and higher class. Maybe you get divorced more, and maybe that puts a dent in the money, but socially the downsides for men in those types of positions are minimal, and it's not like you're going to have any trouble finding pretty young things, even pretty young smart and efficacious things to fuck, marry, and make even more babies with.

For literally everybody else, though, women have it better by every metric I can think of. The differences are most stark at the other end of the spectrum. There's a food stamp program literally called "Women, Infants, and Children", even though women are grown-ass adults with literally all the decision making power about the making of infants and children. They decide who they fuck and on what terms, what contraception they want to use, if they want abort or complete a pregnancy, if they want to keep, adopt out, or surrender/abandon the baby. Women are less likely to be homeless, less likely to be arrested, less likely to be prosecuted, less likely to be convicted, less likely to be incarcerated, and less likely to do serious time. Men also die a shitload more. They're the clear majority of workplace fatalities, violent crime victims, and are a majority of suicides in every country in the world except China (whose "developed" status is debatable). If you include prison and the military, men are even raped more than women. (Probably. The prison rape data is shit, because nobody is incentivized to address the issue honestly. That said, even if half of what Amnesty International thinks is going down is actually true, more men than women are raped in the US every year. Also, while men are majority of military rape victims and nobody knows or cares, including the US Senators writing the US military rape policy, Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill, military men still outnumber women massively, so joining the military as a woman probably does increase your risk of being raped substantially. On the other hand, women pretty much only die in the Army, so joining any other branch is a way for a woman to get hazard pay without any real hazard, to say nothing of other benefits, e.g. for being a single mother.)

But, even if your life isn't shitty, it's still probably just better to be a woman. Girls are less likely to have trouble in school, less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, less likely to be suspended, etc. etc. and this translates into women being a clear, even problematic majority of undergraduate matriculations, an even worse majority of degree holders, and a majority of grad students. Since the Great Recession, they are a majority of the work force, and have been a majority of the white collar work force for even longer. If they start a business, they are offered special loans men are not qualified for, and many state governments are required to give a certain percentage of state contracts to businesses owned by minorities or women. Women who have never married and never had children make more money than men in identical job positions and situations. If you get married, you face no social difficulties if you make less money than your spouse. If you get divorced, you usually get a substantial portion of your spouse's wealth and something like 86% of the custody of the children on average. You benefit from affirmative action hires in essentially every field, even ones dominated by women, such as teaching, because other women are paranoid about pedophiles. Once hired, you benefit from affirmative action promotions until you reach the level of the .1% or higher. To be sure, "Real Woman" privilege exists just as much as "Real Man" privilege does, but there are significantly large sectors of society that accept nonconforming women, but no such mercy bestowed on those failing to rate as "Real Men", relegating them to the ranks of creeps, losers, and nice guys finishing last.

Also, women live longer.

Those saying that both men and women are fucked in developed countries are most correct, though. The two-income trap was a way of turning more of the population into wage slaves. Women are less happy now than they were before second wave feminism, both relative to men and in absolute terms. Most women in first world countries are now "better off" than most men, sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're winning. The problem in these societies isn't really a gender issue or a race issue. The true problem isn't even really a class issue. It's really just banks, corporations, anything that's too big to fail. We measure success in terms of money instead of health and happiness. As such, these societies are heading for a massive social crisis and reorganization, and when that happens...more women will survive. They always do.

On the other side of the crisis, depending on how bad it gets, you might see a greater number of average men enjoying a higher status, similar to, say, 2nd world Eastern Bloc countries (another case of, "are they really what we mean by 'developed'?"), whose men enjoy a relatively high status due to their culture being shaped by just how very, very, many men in the USSR died in WWII. This is also why women in those countries tend to look like pornstars on any given weekday--it's a culture born of decades of all-out pussy arms race.

That's the ultimate why. Much of this is driven by economics, risk and reward, supply and demand, with specific respect to fucking and dying. First world democracies right now have been living in a state of freedom from want. Such circumstances consistently lead to some form of a few men doing very well, most women doing pretty OK, and most men either scraping by or (60%, according to the genome) dying before reproducing.